Three biomedical engineering seniors in the School of Engineering & Applied Science at Washington University in St. Louis, MO used a 3D printer to design and create a robotic prosthetic arm out of bright pink plastic for a teenage girl for a total cost of $200, a fraction of the price of standard prosthetics, which, they say, start at $6,000.

A biomedical engineer at the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, has developed an inexpensive, endoscopic microscope that, he says, can produce real-time, high-resolution, sub-cellular tissue images. The fiber-optic device, which is portable, re-usable, and easily packaged with conventional endoscopes, could help clinicians detect and diagnose early-stage disease, primarily cancer.

A team of mechanical and materials engineers at Duke University, Durham, NC, have devised a way to improve the efficiency of lithotripsy—the crushing of kidney stones using focused shock waves. After decades of research, they say that all it took was cutting a groove near the perimeter of the shock wave-focusing lens and changing its curvature.

A team of researchers at Johns Hopkins Medicine, Baltimore, has designed a computerized imaging process to make minimally invasive surgery more accurate and streamlined using equipment already common in the operating room.

Physicians at the Medical College of Georgia and Georgia Regents University, Augusta, say that the intra-aortic balloon pump, one of the most frequently used mechanical circulatory assist devices in the world may have untapped potential. One of its many uses is helping ensure adequate oxygen and blood is delivered to a heart following coronary bypass surgery.

Timothy Lee, a student at Wake Forest University, Winston-Salem, NC, has built a robotic painting arm that can replicate the lines and shapes a surgeon makes with a scalpel using a paintbrush and canvas. His creative invention, a blend of art and science, could one day lend doctors a hand in practicing complex, robot-assisted surgeries without stepping foot in an operating room.

First-of-its-kind research being done at the Innovation Institute at Henry Ford Hospital, Detroit, MI, shows promise for developing a method of clearly identifying cancerous tissue during surgery on glioblastoma multiforme (GBM), a tumor that attacks tissue around nerve cells in the brain.

The path to innovation is often long and full of challenges. For Corindus Vascular Robotics, the journey to develop the CorPath Vascular Robotic System took 10 years and required overcoming several engineering challenges along the way. Now, a year after receiving approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, CorPath is being used in cath labs across the country, helping interventional cardiologists to precisely advance stents during percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI) procedures to treat patients with coronary artery disease.

Researchers with Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the University of California, Berkeley, say that they have created tactile sensors from composite films of carbon nanotubes and silver nanoparticles similar to the highly sensitive whiskers of cats and rats. These new e-whiskers respond to pressure as slight as a single Pascal, about the pressure exerted on a table surface by a dollar bill. Among their many potential applications is giving robots new abilities to “see” and “feel” their surrounding environment.

Researchers at the Fraunhofer Institute for Microelectronic Circuits and Systems IMS in Duisburg, Germany, have developed a sensor that can measure and individually adjust brain pressure if the pressure is too high in the brain of a patient with hydrocephalus, commonly known as “water on the brain.” Physicians can implant the sensor system, which is approved in Europe for use as a long-term implant, in the head to regulate the pressure.

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Christopher Scott

To find out more about the expertise that Eurofins brings to this area, and the company's plans for expansion into the United States, Medical Device Briefs recently spoke with Christopher Scott, vice president of Eurofins Medical Device Testing.